


Second to Finally

by Saesama



Category: Strange Magic (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Angst with a Happy Ending, Chatlogs, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Minor Injuries, Other, POV Second Person, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Past Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-24
Updated: 2015-11-29
Packaged: 2018-05-03 05:35:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5278658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saesama/pseuds/Saesama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All signs pointed to the Next Life being the one where you'd finally see Marianne again. But this Life wasn't too terrible, considering some of the Lives you lived through. At least the company was good.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Second to Finally

You were always twelve when you remembered that your name was Bog.

This time around, you were Brian Kingston, born to a distant, vaguely disinterested woman in Westminister (the part of your memories that had been a Scottish clan chieftain in the late 1600s found this hilariously depressing or depressingly hilarious, depending on how drunk you were) The woman who gave birth to you treated the entire experience of motherhood as a business arrangement, concluded without fuss when you turned nineteen and moved to New York City. She never questioned why you were all of a sudden ‘Bog’ at some point in the mid-2000s but she so rarely called you by name that it didn't matter, anyway.

You'd met others who shared your First memories, throughout your many lives. You usually died young, but you almost always found someone from That Life, where you were fierce and winged and the size of a walnut. It was necessary, to prove to yourself that you weren’t completely mad (not everyone in your life agreed. You spent most of the late 1700s in an asylum)

Stuff and Thang were the most common recurring figures, the ones you just kept an eye out for every time. They were staples in your lives, always hovering around your ankles, whether you were a chieftain or a general or whatever (once, Thang had been the terrified, ineffective lord of the land you were born on. You went from a serf to his trusted lieutenant in that life, and he often apologized for his inherited ownership of you) Occasionally, it was Griselda, never giving birth to you but always your mother (the Scottish clan chief had a fiery granddaughter that cared for him in his old age)

The last Life, it had been Sunny, a corpsman assigned to your unit in Vietnam. You both sat around camp and talked about the Women Back Home, except they were dozens of lifetimes and who knew how many years ago. You took a dozen bullets in the gut during a firefight, and your last memory of that life was him leaning over you, holding your innards in with both hands while a shell appeared over his shoulder like a specter. You woke up in London at twelve, with scraped knees and a headache where you'd been leaning up against the window of a subway car.

You'd never once found Marianne.

You moved to America because you felt you had to and you got a license for electrical work because you enjoyed it and you needed a work visa. You got a cheap apartment and started writing out your previous memories in a password protected blog and you were almost okay. Not good, but okay.

And then you got put as lead on a job to install a new thermostat system in a small ‘Mending and Alterations’ shop and you found Dawn.

She was ten years your senior and the uncrushable kindness in her was tempered by some past pain, but it was Dawn, she of the fluffy hair and the bright smile. Tiny little Dawn, who wore sundresses with blue jeans and smoked Marlboro's and owned the shop. You'd never seen her in any of your lives, either.

She didn't say anything to you on the first day of the job, nothing about your past connection, anyway. On the second day, she made your crew chocolate chip cookies and called you ‘Mr. King’ and you wondered if you were mistaken. On the third day you saw her poke some scrap fabric into the shape of your long-lost boutonniere and you asked her if it would take another love potion to get her to say ‘hello’.

She yelled at you. You yelled at her. She hugged you around the middle hard enough to make your ribs creak and you wouldn't cry, you were a grown man, you could handle this. You told one of the guys that you were taking a long lunch and she dragged you to a curry cart up the street.

Her composure held until you told her of how you died last time, lying in the mud with Sunny hunched over you in a vain attempt at saving your life. She sniffled into your shoulder and told you that she'd seen Marianne and her father and even Roland once, but she'd never once found Sunny. Her last life had been as a hippy in California in the sixties, and Marianne had run the boarding house she stayed in until her death via tram accident. Marianne died of old age near the turn of the century; Dawn had found the obituary. You'd missed her by just a few short years.

Dawn spent the afternoon hovering over your shoulder while you worked, chattering away about her past lives and the people she had found from That Life (Roland had apologized to her sometime in the early 1800s and she hadn't seen him since) The end of the work day turned into rum and deep dish pizza at her place and you showed her the digital timeline of your memories and she immediately proposed that the two of you map your Lives out and try to find a pattern. You ended up passed out on her far-too-tiny couch, surrounded by crayons and string and computer printouts of maps.

When your lease was up in the fall, you let it lapse in favor of moving into Dawn’s place. In the spring, she offered to marry you so you could get your citizenship. The day you got the marriage license, she laughed and tweaked your nose and called you _her_ ‘Boggy-woggy Kingy-wingy’ and you kissed her to shut her up. She went cross-eyed and started a tickle fight and somewhere in between her teeny fingers in your ribs and barking your elbow on a door jamb, she kissed you back.

(You slept in the same bed and snuggled all the time and made out occasionally but actual sex was very rare and usually weird and if either of you sighed the wrong name, neither of you mentioned it)

There _was_ a pattern to your past lives, a kind of convergence. The jagged line of your lives marched across Europe in a spiral, arching out from somewhere in the UK to curve south and back again before skipping over the Atlantic to the present. Dawn’s formed a similar shape across the northern US and Canada, but her skip was jumping from Seattle to New York in this life. From the short time Dawn knew her in the sixties, Marianne was usually in the southwestern US or Mexico. Sunny had been a Filipino trying to get his own citizenship with military service and had generally implied lives lived in Polynesia. You were all spiraling closer together. You wondered if you'd left Thang and Stuff behind in Britain.

Spring turned to summer turned to a job at the Museum of Natural History to update the lighting system in one of the exhibit halls. This was a Big Deal (not your emphasis) and if it went well, the little firm you worked for could be seeing a lot of new business. Tension ran high (and the place was too shiny-rich-old and you were acutely aware of being out of place, like being in the fairy palace again) and your temper was short and so when you heard two young voices, heavy Texan accents and muffled giggles in the closed-off hall, you barked far harsher than was necessary, _this area’s closed, what th’ hell!_

You saw the boy first, warm brown eyes gone wide in nerves, staring up at where you leaned out of a panel in the wall. You scowled at him and you were very unwillingly brought back to those same eyes leaning over you in a muddy jungle, then back further to looking down at guilt and remorse and a stubborn determination to absolve for his crimes (he spent every summer for many years as the elven ambassador to the Dark Forest, it was his punishment to be away from the Fields at the height of their beauty) Your scowl turned into an undignified gaping and he stuffed his fist against his mouth, no more than ten years old.

Then the girl leaned around him.

Your heart stopped, you were certain; you were dead, you had to be dead, there was no way you could be tits-deep in an electrical panel in New York with a ten-year-old Marianne staring up at you. The first time you’d seen her in maybe a thousand years of living and dying and families that you never quite connected with and she’s less than half your age, she’s a _child_ in a school t-shirt that proclaimed its origin as Amarillo and you were dying, drowning in those still-so-familiar eyes and _she recognized you_.

The moment of shock and recognition turned into resigned sorrow. Sunny sighed through his nose and took Marianne’s hand and her shoulders slumped. Your hand, still somehow clutching your screwdriver, dropped to your side. You couldn’t. She was ten and some stranger’s kid and Dawn was probably three times Sunny’s age and you _couldn’t do anything about this_. So close, so far, and you mirrored Sunny’s sigh and flipped your wrist to dismiss them, like you had a staff in hand. Marianne’s mouth twisted into a familiar, rueful smile and you wished you _would_ just die, it would be better than the pain of your lives brushing like this. She tugged Sunny’s hand back towards the open part of the museum and waved at you over her shoulder, _sorry, mister, we’ll go back, have a nice day._

You finished your shift and went home and cooked dinner. Dawn came home and stole mushrooms out of your stew and you retaliated by writing dirty words into her crossword puzzle and you were pretty certain you were in shock. Dawn pinged on it eventually and poked you and when you bristled she shoved you onto the couch and sat on you until you gave up and told her.

She cried. You might have (you did) She agreed with letting them go, in the end. You were both adults and they were kids and by the time they were adults you’d both be old (and wed for over a decade, what the hell, you married your soulmate’s sister) and it just wasn’t the right Lifetime. Next time, you both agreed, sniffling and glancing at the map pinned up between the windows. Two clean spirals of blue and gold, two spatterings of red and green that _maybe_ followed the same pattern and all signs pointed to the next Life, when maybe everything would come together correctly and you’d have the chance to hold Marianne in your arms again.

Dawn hiccuped and giggled and said that with your luck, you’d all be quadruplet siblings in your next life. You spilled her out of your lap and tickled her until she apologized and you got kicked in the knee and you were okay. 

Not good, but okay.


	2. Quarter to Finally

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't know how to tag for this, but there is a discussion in this chapter between a ten year old girl and a full grown man, about the fact that they both have memories from a past life. I feel Bog (and myself) treated this like a responsible adult would, but I can see how this may edge into uncomfortable territory for some.

Your name was Maria Lopez, you were ten years old and you were the _best_ at Google.

That, or Bog was the _worst_ at encryption.

Really, it was neither, you knew that. Your Google-fu was adequate for a kid your age and Bog had made his blog password protected but not hidden from search engines. You managed to wait until you got back home to make the search, but you were as surprised as anyone when ‘bog king marianne dawn sunny goblin’ returned a result. You sat there and stared and felt your heart beat between your ears (and it felt like every time you remembered yourself, all of the many times you sat up with a little _oh_ as everything swam back to the front of your mind) and eventually, you clicked the link.

There was a password. It wasn’t your name (your real name, the one you were still uncomfortable claiming because you were always nine when you remembered and a year wasn’t enough time to assimilate everything) It wasn’t his name, or his mom’s. You bit your lip and tried ‘LovePotion’ and you were amazed all over again when that worked. It was plain; no background, no banner image, plain black text on a plain grey field, a long list of ‘CONTINUE HERE’ links and dates. You swallowed and clicked one.

It was a set of pictures, taken with someone’s cell phone. A world map was pinned to a corkboard on a wall, pins stuck in and twined with colored thread in blue and yellow. One was a spiral across Europe, the other sprawled across the western edge of North America. But no, there was more, a vague flick of pins off the east coast of Asia, and another set in Mexico and the southern US. You leaned in and squinted and your heart seized because you knew those places, you’d talked about them with Dawn last time.

One was in Amarillo.

You were hyperventilating. 

You scrolled down, your knuckles white on your mouse. Close-up shots of the main areas of the map, an attempt at forming the same spiral pattern around the few pins in the south (your pins), another shot with the string removed and a sticky note with a frowny face stuck over Texas. Then a picture that turned your rapid breath into stone in your throat; the man from the museum, fighting a smile as a petite blond lady squished their faces together for a selfie with the map in the background. It had been him, _it had been him_ , you’d almost convinced yourself that you were mistaken, that the worker at the museum had just been a coincidence but no, _it was Bog and he had Dawn with him._

You hit ‘back’ and kept scrolling.

Dawn made posts as well, it seemed. Their writing styles were very different - Dawn posted in typed shorthand, bulleted lists of details about this Life or that one. Bog got poetic with his descriptions, describing places as much as he did people and events. You read with wide-eyed fascination, pouring through their stories, picking out details and references to you and Sunny and everyone else from the Life that started everything.

One link made your heart do an odd flip. It was just two pictures. The first was a New York marriage license, proclaiming the union between Brian Kingston and Diana Lark. Under it was a Naturalization Certificate for Brian Kingston, formerly of England. The documents were set on a table and barely edging into the top of the frame was the base of two wine glasses and a bottle. You didn’t know if you wanted to laugh or cry.

You hit ‘back’ again and the blog had updated. You read the newest link and it was a description of you and Regta in the museum, two kids that ducked under a rope barrier and shook a man to the core. He called you by your true names and his shock and dismay was thick enough to eat, even through the screen. The last line almost brought tears to your eyes, ‘ _I finally find her and she’s a kid. God hates me._ ’

You scrolled all the way up and clicked on the ‘Send Message’ link, your blood thundering in your head. Nerves made your hands shake and you didn’t know what to say, what to type, _how do you greet your soulmate after a thousand years?_

 **MariMari:** Hi! This is maria. marianne. how are you?

_Like a complete dork, that’s how._

He didn’t respond for a while. Oh god, did you send him into shock? Did you give him a heart attack? You had no idea how old he was, he was scruffy and grey at the temples but his face didn’t _seem_ old but maybe he moisturized _did you kill Bog with a terribly timed message on stupid Livejournal?!_

 **B.King:** Marianne.  
**MariMari:** Hi! yeah, it’s me, you saw us at the museum? me and sunny? well, he’s regta this time around, it means warm and sincere, how is that for a coincidence?  
**B.King:** You shouldn’t have contacted me.

Your heart did something hard and terrible in your throat.

 **MariMari:** Why NOT?  
**B.King:** Marianne, I don’t know if you noticed, but you happen to be a child. A kid. I am not.  
**MariMari:** SO? i got plenty of memories of being an adult and plenty of memories of YOU.  
**B.King:** MARIANNE DON’T. I don’t care how many memories you have, you’re a ten year old kid. A CHILD. Yes, I miss what we had, but not enough to creep on a kid.  
**MariMari:** A kid you married in a past life and swore to never abandon and who hasn’t seen you in fortybillion years. and i turn eleven in a few weeks.  
**B.King:** You’re not going to guilt trip me. Tell Sunny that Dawn and I say ‘hello’ and forget about us for, oh, the next rest of your life? Next Lifetime, love.  
**MariMari:** What makes you so sure? your map?  
**B.King:** Saw that, did you? Yeah, we’ve been tracing the pattern, what I could remember of Sunny’s Lives and what Dawn could remember of yours. We’re all coming closer. Be patient.  
**MariMari:** I don’t want to wait a whole life without you! compromise. meet me when I’m sixteen.

The delay after that was the longest five minutes of your life.

 **B.King:** Eighteen. There’s a place in Central Park, a little stream called the Loch. I’ll meet you where it goes under the Huddlestone Arch at noon on the summer Solstice. That poetic enough for you?  
**MariMari:** No but okay. it will work. also you're the drama queen not me. i miss you, bog.  
**B.King:** I miss you too, Marianne.  
**MariMari:** Also also your password is terrible. i’m adding mine and sunnys stories to the list.  
**B.King:** Is not. But okay, I can concede that. You better tag them correctly, it took me weeks to get Dawn to even use punctuation.  
**MariMari:** Oh my god i almost forgot that you married DAWN.  
**B.King:** Good night, Marianne.  
**MariMari:** Regta is gonna poop when I tell him.

No response after that, even though you kept refreshing for about an hour. None the next day, or the next, and you finally showed the blog and the chatlog to Regta. He did, in fact, flip out and you two spent a long, distressing time trying to figure out what their kids would look like (blue eyes that could ruin lives was the only thing you could agree on) But you both started typing up your memories and adding them to the blog, and sometimes, Bog or Dawn would add commentary or more tags or run a spell-check and you set yourself a Facebook alarm for Solstice in eight years and okay. You could wait.

That fall, Bog and Dawn stopped posting to the blog. It took you a while, but you found the newspaper article about the fire in their apartment complex, how they had sustained deadly injuries trying to evacuate as many people as they could, how they were heroes. You and Regta (Sunny, he was Sunny more and more now) cried on each other for hours.

 _Next life,_ he sniffled against your hair and you nodded, your throat tight. Next life.


	3. Finally Ever After

Your name was Dawn, you’d _always_ been Dawn, and you bounced on your toes in excitement.

Some things never changed, no matter how much they changed, and New York City was one of them. It had been nearly a half century since you last walked around Central Park, but it was weirdly the same as you left it. The Ravine was still there, anyway, with the Loch curling through it, cleaner and clearer than you ever remembered seeing it. You stood on the path above the water and checked your watch for the ninety-fifth time. You were eighteen and it was a quarter to noon, summer Solstice 2057.

You hoped they all remembered. Bog’s old blog was gone, vanished in the internet collapse in 2020, but you’d been there when Bog agreed to meet Marianne right here, leaning over his shoulder and quietly crying as he told Marianne that they couldn’t be together then. And then that _stupid fire_ made liars out of you both. Bog’s last words, before his final, fatal trip back in the burning building had been “Solstice, by the Arch. Don’t forget.” Then he disappeared into the flames and you’d gone back in yourself when you heard poor Ms. Braeburn yelling from the lobby. You didn’t remember anything after that.

Promises _mattered_. You’d all promised, way back when you were teeny-tiny and winged (except poor Sunny but no one could wrangle a dragonfly like him) that you’d do what you could to find each other in the future and you’d meant it, with all of your heart, and there was magic in promises, old fey magic from the days the Courts ruled the world and an Oath sworn became a force of nature. Bog and Marianne were too cynical, and Sunny was too doubting, but you’d taken a Love Potion to the face and felt the power of True Magic warp your heart and you never doubted once. You knew, deep in your chest (and in the achy shoulders where your wings should have been) that your promise had become an Oath, and the power of that Oath let you all keep your memories from life to lonely life. It was strong enough for it to affect others around you, too; Griselda and Dagda and Stuff and Thang (and even Roland, and wow, that had been _weird_ )

You looked at your watch again. Eleven fifty five. Your heart sank a little. Were they reborn yet? Were they old enough? Was this going to be like last time, when you were ten years older than everyone? 

“Dawn?”

You spun around on your heel and your breath snagged. The woman was a few years older than you and her hair was the wrong shade of brown but you’d recognize Marianne anywhere. She stared at you, her fingers curled into her shirt above her heart and you shrieked and launched yourself at her.

She was shorter than you. It was hilarious.

But she was just as fierce and strong as ever and she clutched you back hard enough to hurt, hard enough that her fingertips would leave little bruises on your shoulder blades and you were crying, you were _sobbing_ , you were ruined and you’d never stop crying you’d-

“We, ah, interrupting?”

You both looked up, ready to rip apart anyone who _dared_ break you two apart and a way-too-tall punk was standing there, just barely cruising out of a late-teens growth spurt and behind him was a far shorter kid who’d never see that growth spurt and both of them were watching you and Marianne cry on each other and if seeing Marianne ruined you then seeing Bog and Sunny absolutely stopped your heart and-

Marianne’s arms weren’t around you anymore because Bog was at your left and Sunny was on your right and you were all laughing and crying and there was a lot of kisses going every which way and someone stepped on the edge of your skirt and you all went ass over teakettle into the grass and Marianne was trying to hiccup out something about Griselda and Sunny mentioned Dagda and you managed to stutter out that you went to school with Stuff and Thang and it all dissolved into a big puppypile of embarrassingly mushy declarations and if something disastrous killed you all off early in this life _you were going to wring Fate’s neck_.

You felt Bog's mouth smile against your hairline. "Finally better than okay," he murmured, his breath a little wheezy because Marianne and Sunny were tangled together on top of him and you buried your head under his chin and found Sunny's hand with yours and yeah. Finally better than okay.

**Author's Note:**

> *does a flying backflip into Love Potion hell*
> 
> Confession time: I've been trying to write this story for YEARS. I just never found the characters it applied to.


End file.
